Project Description

Due to corrosion, the Department of Defense (DoD) loses approximately 20.6 billion dollars to corrosion and materials degradation annually. To help mitigate these problems, protective paints or coatings are used. However, corrosion can occur under the paint, making it difficult to detect. Therefore, the goal of this project is to explore flash thermography and identify if it can detect corrosion and defects under painted surfaces. Using standardized steel samples, we prepared a variety of both painted and unpainted samples that were corroded/damaged with scratches and holes. After painting over them, we used the Thermal Wave Imaging Echotherm paired with a FLIR Ex-Series 6 Infrared Camera, to run scans of the samples where we successfully observed corrosion and defects under a painted surface. We utilized the “Region of Interest” setting to effectively observe and locate the induced corrosion and defects under the painted surface. These results are significant as they take the first step in establishing flash thermography as a reliable test method for detecting subsurface corrosion and defects.